Creeping Beauty: Fairy Tales Gone Bad
A magical and creepy retelling of Sleeping Beauty in verse – spooky, gothic and the perfect gift for 7–9 year-olds
Celebrate Halloween and the spooky season with this subversive, funny – and deliciously prickly! – tale for the young reader looking for a book with bite. Written in verse by former Waterstones Children's Laureate Joseph Coelho and illustrated by Freya Hartas.
Eshe and her twelve sisters are Fairy Godmothers, honoured for the incredible gifts they can bestow. But Eshe’s special abilities are a little different – she can glimpse into the future! And, one day, Eshe foresees something terrifying: a world blanketed in creeping vines and a girl covered in thorns. Eshe needs to stop her vision becoming true, but it will require old and powerful magic. And she won’t be able to do it alone…
Following on from Zombierella and Frankenstiltskin, this is the third and final book in a deliciously dark trilogy of twisted classics, written in verse by the winner of the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing Joseph Coelho and illustrated by Freya Hartas.
“This twist on Sleeping Beauty is absorbing, original and deliciously magical.” BookTrust
Creators
Joseph Coelho was the Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2022–2024, and is an award-winning poet, playwright and writer. In 2024 he won the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing for The Boy Lost in the Maze and was awarded an OBE for his services to the arts, to children’s reading and to literature. His first poetry collection, Werewolf Club Rules!, , won the CLPE Children's Poetry Award in 2015, and he has been writing and performing ever since. His picture books include If All the World Were... illustrated by Allison Colpoys and the Luna Loves... series illustrated by Fiona Lumbers. His poetry books for children include Overheard in a Tower Block illustrated by Kate Milner, A Year of Nature Poems illustrated by Kelly Louise Judd, and his novel in verse, The Girl Who Became a Tree. Originally from London, he now lives in Edinburgh. Follow him on X as @JosephACoelho and on Instagram as @josephcoelhoauthor.
Freya Hartas is an award-winning illustrator of children's books. She illustrated Dark Lord: Teenage Years which won the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, and she won the Lemniscaat Illustration Award for her first standalone picture book, Little Kong. She also illustrated the Isle of Misfits series and Frankie Frog and the Throaty Croakers. She is the illustrator of the first two stories in the Fairy Tales Gone Bad series, Zombierella and Frankenstiltskin written by Joseph Coelho. Find her online at freyahartas.co.uk, and on Twitter and Instagram as @FreyaHartas.
Reviews
As the title suggests, this is not your standard fairytale. Lots of fun – and it’s written as a verse novel, so I loved it.
Sally Murphy
